Tag: Currency Reserve

China's foreign currency holdings remained above $3 trillion in December even as the yuan capped its steepest annual decline in more than two decades.
Reserves fell $41.08 billion to $3.01 trillion, the People’s Bank of China said in a statement Saturday. That matched a $3.01 trillion estimate in a Bloomberg survey...

China has failed to curb excesses in its credit system and faces mounting risks of a full-blown banking crisis, according to early warning indicators released by the world’s top financial watchdog.
A key gauge of credit vulnerability is now three times over the danger threshold and has continued to deteriorate, despite pledges by Chinese...

The Chairman of the China Gold Association and General Manager and Party Committee Secretary of China National Gold Group Corporation, the latter being China's largest gold mining enterprise, is Song Xin and happens to be one of my favorite commentators in China. This gentleman made waves in July 2014...

This is the first step toward one world currency.
They promised, they delivered. The World Bank will issue a $2.8 billion SDR bond, or Special Drawing Rights bond, in China in August. Separately, the China Development Bank will also issue between $300 million and $800 million of SDR notes.
China, the...

SHANGHAI -- With the yuan set to enter the Special Drawing Rights currency basket in October, China looks to create a market for SDR-denominated bonds as a step toward internationalizing the country's currency.
The government-linked China Development Bank as early as this month will issue $300 million to $800 million...

But it's not quite that simple. In fact, Beijing benefits from the dollar’s dominance.
On April 16, Zhou Xiaochuan, the governor of China’s central bank, the People’s Bank of China, once again set off alarm bells during a speech at the International Monetary Fund (IMF). “Starting from this April,” he...

Credit rater cuts the country’s debt by two notches; ratings outlook is negative.
Standard & Poor’s Global Ratings stripped the U.K. of its pristine triple-A credit rating on Monday, following through on its warning that last week’s vote to leave the European Union threatens the country’s constitutional and economic integrity.
The...

In recent years, the United States has had positive net international income (e.g., stock dividends and bond coupon payments) despite being a net debtor to China. China, however, has had negative net income, despite being a lender to the United States. Recent policy changes in China could end this...

They call them bachaqueros. Venezuela's army of black market shoppers descend every day at dawn outside Caracas’s biggest stores.
Named after the bachaco leaf-cutting ant that carries several times its weight, the men and women queue alongside hundreds of other Venezuelans for food, nappies, milk and other basic goods.
A demonstrator...

China, as current chair of the G-20 group of nations, called on France to organize a very special conference in Paris. The fact such a conference would even take place in an OECD country is a sign of how weakened the hegemony of the US-dominated Dollar System has become.
On...

The world is getting an object lesson on the problems of having one dominant global currency and even the supposed prime beneficiary, the United States, can see the downside.
Alarming bouts of volatility in world financial markets over the past 12 months have been rooted in a fear of what...

As we’ve been reporting for months, China is quietly becoming a dominant player in the world gold market, as the yellow metal shifts from the West to the East. Now the mainstream media is starting to take notice.
Not only is China the top consumer of gold in the world,...

Since strong pressure on the Bulgarian government back in 2014 caused her to stop construction of the Russian gas pipeline, South Stream, that was to have supplied Russian gas to the Balkans and on to Austria and Italy, Brussels has argued that the stop was necessary because of “regional energy...

On 19 April 2016, China was rolling out its new gold-backed yuan. Russia’s ruble has been fully supported by gold for the last couple of years. Nobody in the western media talks about it. Why would they? – A western reader may start wondering why he is constantly stressed...

Billionaire investor George Soros said China’s debt-fueled economy resembles the U.S. in 2007-08, before credit markets seized up and spurred a global recession.
China’s March credit-growth figures should be viewed as a warning sign, Soros said at an Asia Society event in New York on Wednesday. The broadest measure of...

China pushes a multicurrency reserve system at heart of the world’s financial order.
China's utterances over the years on the International Monetary Fund's special drawing rights confirm the Beijing authorities’ reputation for long-term thinking as well their ability to create riddles on what the goals actually are.
The mystery is starting...

Former CIA Advisor Jim Rickards Calculated a Conservative Gold Price Target of $10,000 Per Ounce Based on the Current Cash Supply of the United States... Including All Currency, the Number is Too Shocking to Even Mention.
James Rickards is the Editor of Strategic Intelligence, a financial newsletter, and Director of...

We hear a lot about the role of central banks in the world’s economies. But what exactly have they been doing over the last few years, and what has the actual impact been?
Central banks have the authority over the interest rates and the quantity of a nation’s currency. Their...

The SDR is an international reserve asset, created by the IMF in 1969 to supplement its member countries’ official reserves. As of March 2016, 204.1 billion SDRs (equivalent to about $285 billion) had been created and allocated to members. SDRs can be exchanged for freely usable currencies. The value...

The Chinese yuan was included in the IMF's elite basket of reserve currencies last year.
BEIJING—China’s central bank Governor Zhou Xiaochuan said the government will make efforts to expand the use of the International Monetary Fund’s basket of reserve currencies in its domestic economy.
Mr. Zhou said China will use both...

Why a reform of the financial system is inevitable, with or without crisis.
An introduction to lawyer, portfolio manager, government adviser, lecturer, and author James Rickards could easily be five pages long. Sifting through his CV, it’s easier to pick the things he doesn’t do rather than listing all the...

How the internationalization of China’s currency hurts Washington’s ability to punish human rights violators.
In November 2015, when the International Monetary Fund announced it was adding China’s currency, the renminbi (RMB), to its basket of four reserve currencies known as Special Drawing Rights (SDR), the fund’s managing director, Christine Lagarde,...

Bank of America Merrill Lynch says probability of hard landing about 5 per cent.
Mainland China’s gross domestic product growth could slow to as little as 3.7 per cent this year in a worst-case scenario outlined in a detailed report by Bank of America Merrill Lynch.
It comes after billionaire investor...

Chinese central bank governor Zhou Xiaochuan has accused "speculative forces" of targeting the country's currency, the yuan.
He said there was no reason for the yuan to keep depreciating in value and that China would not let international speculators dominate market sentiment.
Mr Zhou's remarks come as Chinese markets prepare to...

It's not just stocks have a terrible start to the year, in fact the worst start in history: so is the amount of US Treasuries held in custody at the Fed, a direct proxy for the holdings of foreign central banks, reserve managers and sovereign wealth funds who park...

In the first week of 2016, Saudi deputy crown prince Mohammed bin Salman, in an interview with the Economist, revealed that the Saudi government is considering selling shares in government-owned Saudi Aramco and/or its downstream assets through an IPO. He indicated that a decision on the IPO and its...

All the phantom wealth piled up in China's boost phase is now melting down, and the China Syndrome will trigger a meltdown in global phantom assets.
The 1979 film The China Syndrome took its name from the darkly humorous notion that a nuclear reactor meltdown in the U.S. would burn...

Russia has just taken significant steps that will break the present Wall Street oil price monopoly, at least for a huge part of the world oil market. The move is part of a longer-term strategy of decoupling Russia’s economy and especially its very significant export of oil, from the...

On Monday, we brought you “Saudi Default, Devaluation Odds Spike As Mid-East Careens Into Chaos,” in which we outlined the jump in riyal forwards and widening of CDS spreads that Riyadh witnessed in the aftermath of the kingdom’s move to cut diplomatic ties with Iran.
In short: the market is...

Time is a luxury that Saudi Arabia can no longer take for granted. It faces an economic time bomb, which, if not defused, will have severe and possibly irreversible effects both nationally and internationally. The 2014-2015 collapse in oil prices has slashed the Kingdom’s main source of revenue which...